Interview with Pang Tao in Smart Space: Pioneer Road of Traditional Industries in the Age of Big Data.

Speaking of big data, we are good at and familiar with this field. Most of them are Internet companies, based on a large number of online user interactions as data support, so as to achieve the purpose of precise marketing and improve efficiency and income. However, offline data collection has always been a pain point and difficulty in the industry.

Various roads. Com interviewed Pang Tao, CTO of Smart Space, hoping to help you understand how offline big data can be effectively collected and utilized, and how traditional industries should face the Internet.

One afternoon, I met Pang Tao at Starbucks in Xinzhongguan. He looks in a hurry. He just went to Microsoft to talk about product promotion cooperation and was interviewed by me.

Grounding hardware and passenger box in intelligent space

Pang Tao's company is called Smart Space. In his view, there are so many people in the world. As a company focusing on offline big data collection, it should naturally cover all ground spaces. "I have the responsibility to help all ground spaces and realize the ability to manage passenger flow with big data. 」

The company "Smart Space" is not well-known in the industry. Their product "Passenger Flow Box" is not well known to users because it is a 2B-side product, but this does not prevent them from succeeding in offline big data.

Traditional market research is to find a market research company, do some questionnaires, and infer market customers through statistical principles. The passenger flow box is to help merchants collect enough passenger flow data, provide solutions for the passenger flow monitoring of merchants, and help retail enterprises to better realize market research. By retaining devices and data, accurate users can be identified.

For example, after identifying a customer, you can identify that a customer came from 9: 00 to 10, and refresh it every 5 seconds, so you can identify that this customer has been staying in this time period. If we can monitor that this customer comes to the store four times a month on average in half a year, then the store can know the value of this customer. The radius of passenger flow box is about 30 meters, which can identify the model of mobile phone equipment very accurately. The reason why it can be monitored through wireless network is actually very simple.

With the advent of the mobile Internet era, everyone will have a mobile phone, which will send out radio waves. If there is a device that can hear this radio wave and identify it at the same time, the number of passengers can be accurately calculated by recording the number of mobile phones. We know that in the process of radio wave transmission, there must be a feature code with hardware, which is fixed. By monitoring this, you can lock in the consumption of a consumer in various stores.

What kind of product is the passenger flow box? In layman's terms, this is a hardware product that monitors the passenger flow in the store, but it may be the most grounded hardware I have ever seen. At the front end, the passenger flow box mainly uses the economically mature wireless wifi technology to identify customers' mobile phones and other wireless devices, and then can accurately and conveniently count valuable data such as passenger flow, stay time, store entry rate and return rate. At the back end, professional and easy-to-understand passenger flow related data reports are provided through the system background to help customers realize the perfect combination of offline accurate data and CRM, and finally realize accurate marketing.

At present, the passenger box has probably cooperated with more than 500 physical stores. The goal this year is to extend them to tens of thousands or so. Promotion mainly takes the 2B channel. At present, they have also obtained angel round financing.

Difficult pioneer, the road to the development of offline data

In Pang Tao's view, Internet giants can't fundamentally solve the demand of offline stores to obtain users. For example, for a specific offline restaurant, how many people come to the restaurant for dinner a day, who will come here for dinner, and what kind of people these people are. In fact, for a physical store, he basically has no means, and the so-called giant can't solve this dilemma.

Of course, many offline stores will have some stupid means, but these means often have many disadvantages.

First of all, there are a lot of data missing, so the monitoring can not achieve effective accuracy. All stores like Zara have three cameras to count the number of people in the store. There is also a convenience store 7 1 1, which is more intelligent. As long as you get the counter, as soon as you open the door, the counter will automatically add 1, and when you open it, it will add 1. In fact, it's not that businesses don't want to monitor these figures, but that they don't have enough means to monitor these figures. Like 7 1 1, a group of 20 people opened the door at once, and everyone monitored it together, so it was impossible to monitor it accurately. Cameras have the same problem, and there will be a phenomenon that a person appears in two cameras and is counted twice. Moreover, the accuracy of image recognition is not very high, which makes it impossible for you to accurately calculate the number of people.

Secondly, even if the specific number of people is monitored, it is impossible to know the passenger flow trend. How many people are in the shop? This is just the first step of offline big data. For businesses, what they are more concerned about is what consumers are most concerned about? Where did they go in the store, where did they stay the longest, and so on? These data can help offline stores quickly adjust their product strategies. This kind of heat map of monitoring flow is very common online, but there is no solution offline.

Finally, the final conversion rate of the number of people arriving at the store. I believe this will be the most concerned data for all businesses. Who come to the store to try on clothes in the fitting room? The current monitoring is based on after-sales data. How many orders did this store sell? What is the unit price of this customer? But in fact, a brand has done a lot of marketing, which actually has a cost to this store. Even if it is natural traffic, it is very expensive to get this good position, so it is traffic. Merchants certainly want to find ways to make users' acquisition costs lower.

The battle of data giants, the conflict between cooperation and competition

In Pang Tao's view, online traffic is relatively easy to monitor no matter what webpage you visit. But when it comes to offline, there is often no effective means to monitor offline traffic. People come and go, the transaction rate, which is the most important data for businesses, can only rely on after-sales data rudely.

This is obviously wrong. Pang Tao said with emotion, "We should do something for offline businesses." . For a shop on the ground, it should have some means to catch its customers. But from beginning to end, many people will think that collecting data should be done by giants.

However, Pang Tao doesn't quite agree with this. In his view, BAT giants often do have this ability to help offline stores. For example, Alibaba gave them routers and POSS machines, but these giants all have a core interest appeal: "Online traffic is stagnant and needs to extract traffic from offline", which is why Ali wants to acquire Yintai.

Internet giants try to do O2O, which is actually for this purpose. I used to think that I could cover from online to offline, but now I think about how to intercept traffic from offline. They often adopt the so-called internet thinking, which is simply to cater to this market through low price or free. But the starting point of BAT is very different from smart space. Even if the giants give money to offline stores for free, offline merchants are not necessarily willing to cooperate with the giants.

Pang Tao said, "The core appeal of BAT is to conduct traffic from offline stores, which is terrible. We help offline stores have the ability to acquire users online and help businesses learn how to use big data for precise marketing. But now the online ability is not strong enough, so now we are also cooperating with some online businesses, hoping to get through some online big data sources. Once with the online big data source BAT+JD.COM, they all wanted to draw water from the offline, and the negotiations were extremely difficult. 」

Offline stores are the most valuable customer resources in smart space. From the customer's point of view, there is no way to guide the passenger flow to e-commerce and online Internet giants, but this is often the basic appeal of these giants. To some extent, online data are often in conflict, but Pang Tao said that offline benefits should still be given priority. "What we need at least is equal dialogue and exchange of traffic, which makes sense. Otherwise, the traffic is wasted. How can we stand offline? 」

Pain points and difficulties make the mobile phone number the only pass.

Coverage, high cost of land promotion, and weak willingness of merchants to cooperate. These are common pain points and difficulties, and smart space cannot be avoided. Pang Tao said that Smart Space has cooperated with two large shopping centers and has been online for half a year. In some cafes and hotels, passenger boxes are laid.

On the question of monitoring accuracy, I mentioned a question in the interview. Simply identifying "people" through "equipment" may not be able to identify "who am I". Online and offline membership cards are quite popular now, and there are some specific identity information behind these cards, such as age, income, height and so on. The passenger box can only monitor the passenger flow, which seems to be some invalid traffic.

"The cost of membership card is too high" is Pang Tao's strong response. E-membership card will be more accurate with more information. But to establish a good membership card system, it needs at least millions, and it needs a separate device to verify the card. The cost of getting a membership card is 10 yuan. "In the era of big data, what we emphasize is not how accurate this data is, but how big everyone gets this data. This is the core idea. " The passenger flow box hopes to use the mobile phone as the only symbol, then use it as the only symbol of identity, and finally make the mobile phone number the only pass offline and online.

As for how to identify these mobile phone numbers, Pang Tao said that it is mainly through cooperation with the corresponding manufacturers. By comparing the identified signature, we will cooperate with the manufacturer of web certification. "Let's count the frequencies, they will identify people. These manufacturers can't recognize the feature code of mobile phones, but they have mobile phone numbers. For example, there are 500 people in this store and they know the number of 300 people. We compared the signature with the mobile phone number through three excavations. I did data mining at 0 1 in China Mobile, and got through these data to serve this business. 」

Finally, there is no need to bring a membership card online or offline. Identifying the combination of mobile phone number and hardware feature code becomes the re-establishment of member system identification. Combined with the hardware feature code scanned every 5 seconds and algorithm identification, devices placed in various places can basically identify where this user lives. Maintain these people, and the basic lifeline of this store will be maintained. In this way, offline stores have a very good and cheap tool.

Businessmen's confusion, how to use offline traffic?

The greatest significance of these data is that it can accurately identify the target customers of the merchants. For example, monitoring a customer to the store twice in a certain period of time is actually a repeat customer. This line can be well monitored, but offline businesses are difficult to monitor.

The passenger box is refreshed every 5 seconds. As long as this number appears in this store, a dot will appear in the background every 5 seconds, which actually forms a basic data. On the one hand, it can locate customers, on the other hand, it can track customers and know where they have gone, whether they have changed clothes or not, and whether they have checked out. A store like Zara is definitely not allowed to put cameras in the fitting room. At this time, monitoring is often a difficult point. Through the monitoring of the box in the store, if a customer is monitored to go to the fitting room, the value of this customer to the merchant can actually be preliminarily judged. But now the price for merchants to get these data is 300 yuan.

300 yuan, this is the current price of passenger box. In addition, the merchants have to pay 30 yuan's service fee every month. However, Pang Tao said that the service fee in 30 yuan is not mandatory, but is charged according to the service effect provided to customers. For example, Smart Space helps customers lock in 5,000 customers, and each customer charges 50 cents for finding a business. These users are customers with accurate business goals. Is it worth it?

After solving the confusion of merchants in cost, it is about how to use the collected data. Working experience in JD.COM made Pang Tao very familiar with e-commerce. "When I was working in JD.COM, there was an instrument to monitor online data, and both pv and uv were detected. Why doesn't the flow of the last pair of shoes come up in five minutes, and I can change a product in a few minutes? " . Last year, Jack Jones spent twice as much money on double 1 1, but the traffic still couldn't come. This means that online traffic has actually reached a bottleneck period. No matter how much money is spent, it will not grow rapidly. So this year, JD.COM and Ali both went offline, and everyone took a fancy to the offline passenger flow. 」

Pang Tao believes that customers' needs are always diverse, and the E-commerce Association is a good supplement, but not all. At present, there is no way to completely replace offline. The core factor for consumers to buy 3C products in JD.COM is that they are cheap and secure. "If JD.COM is more expensive than others 100 yuan, will you try? Before, Suning was guaranteed to be cheaper than JD.COM for a while 100 yuan, and later took away a lot of goods from JD.COM. "

This is why JD.COM should vigorously develop third parties instead of self-management, and now JD.COM can't guarantee the advantage of low price. So now, whether online or offline, all roads lead to the same goal. "The key for you to maintain a customer, whether offline or online, lies in the comprehensive experience and integrity to give people the highest value. 」

The purpose of offline traffic is to enable businesses to make the target audience feel a good comprehensive experience and cost performance. For example, the passenger flow box has monitored that a customer will come to the store several times a month, and it can basically be concluded that this customer should be a loyal VIP of the merchant. At this time, you can directly give this customer a 20% discount card and keep this customer completely.

These are just some preliminary data utilization, and the passenger flow box should help merchants solve the two most important things-pulling new things and keeping old ones. "We have to make big data very short and easy to answer. You can't let big data make everyone incomprehensible. Through the background of the passenger flow box, merchants can easily export data reports, which may include the store manager, date, number of stores, passenger flow, total number of repeat customers every day, sales volume, customer unit price and other data.

Any business follows the pyramid concept, such as passenger flow, conversion rate, customer unit price and gross profit rate. These are the four most critical indicators of an enterprise, and both e-commerce and offline stores will always follow this law. The problem solved by the passenger flow box is to help businesses complete information that cannot be collected. For merchants, what can be collected is always sales data such as customer unit price and gross profit margin. Improving the data ability of merchants will naturally help merchants to better realize old retention.

Pang Tao said that no one can have all the data at present, but the passenger flow box captures a core, who are you, where are you from, where are you going, and how can I contact you. When the coverage is large enough, the user's portrait will become more and more accurate. As for how to use these data, it still depends on the experience of the merchants themselves. The passenger box only provides one tool.

"We can check how long this VIP has been in this mall, and we can do one-on-one precision marketing. 10% of major customers in shopping malls. Do you know who they are? There are also some enterprises, he will buy some benefits for enterprises and purchase office supplies. We can help the store catch these customers. Of course, there should also be some traditional means, such as man-to-man marking. But if there is our monitoring system and someone comes, will you feel better if you send a soda? We will tell users that you come to me to spend money, and we have someone here to serve you. We're just helping to get off the assembly line. 」

Regarding the increment, the core key of the passenger flow box is to form an alliance between peers. Pang Tao said, "Clients A and B are mine, so I can't give Client A's data to B, and I can't give Client B's data to A, which is immoral. But if they don't cross, where does the increment between them come from? Then I want to talk to a and b at the same time. In this industry, everyone shares this data at the same time. You contribute your contribution, he contributes his contribution. Everyone is in the same pool. Of course, I won't tell anyone where this customer came from. But with so many customers in this pool for everyone to use and enjoy, you can get an increase. Then you can charge in increments. 」

For a simple example, there are three cafes with 300 people each, a total of 900 people. These 900 people are the target customers of this shopping mall, but the passenger box will not tell these customers which store they belong to, just tell the merchants that these 900 people like to drink coffee, and then compete for the quality and comprehensive experience of these three coffees.

Future, Change, Attempt and Business Model

Offline big data, which everyone wants to do, is the most difficult thing for entrepreneurs to promote. The smart space team now has 20 people, 95% of whom are engaged in research and development. But there was no large-scale promotion earlier, and Pang Tao thought it was because their products were not perfect.

"Now the concept of O2O is very popular. Many people are doing this, but not many people can get these tables. Who can show you customers, contact information, and whether these people are your loyal customers? No one can show you. We have been deeply involved in this industry for two and a half years, but we always feel that the product experience is not enough and there is no way to promote it. But now, after this table came out, we felt that we could do some precise marketing, so we began to promote it and stayed ahead of our competitors for two years. 」

As for the business model, Pang Tao said that the data accumulated by the platform will not be sold to others, not because the data is the core asset, but because the real owner and buyer of these data should be this shopping mall, which is the biggest difference between smart space and e-commerce. Because the goal is simple, that is, to help the offline stores grow, and finally get some marketing expenses from the stores. So from the beginning, it was to help businesses maintain old customers. There may be no charge in this respect, but when merchants want to get an increase, they will hope to give some commission, so that they can cover the cost.

As for the biggest cost in the hardware field, Pang Tao said that they are not very sensitive to the cost. As long as the data is fast and accurate, even if the quotation is higher, the merchant will still pay the bill. This is the biggest difference between the B-end market and the C-end market.

For the passenger box in Pang Tao, the biggest risk may be user privacy. Because when the merchant obtains the phone number of the target customer, it will inevitably carry out marketing through SMS, which is not allowed by the user. This is somewhat similar to the nature of private base stations outside.

Pang Tao said that this base station has a fatal problem because there is no historical data to compare. The base station intercepted the cell phone signal. At that time, the cell phone could not make a call, so the country was cracking down on this matter. The passenger box is different. For example, consumers visit three A/B/C stores in a shopping mall, all of which have their own characteristics. The platform will recommend relevant things to consumers, instead of simply and rudely sending spam messages. And pushing this message is not something the platform does. There are no goods in smart space, so it is meaningless to push them to businesses. The platform just gives the merchants the ability to push and then control the merchants. Don't push when you don't allow it, and you can send it out when you allow it.

At this point, the conversation is almost over. Pang Tao has thought thoroughly enough about the future development of passenger flow box, and the collection and utilization of offline big data will still be a big pain point. There is still a certain legal risk that the passenger flow box can identify the user's mobile phone number by scanning the device feature code. But it at least gave me an idea. When Internet people claim to transform traditional industries, what they really want to solve is to help offline enterprises, not to get anything from them. This may be the right way.

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